It was now apparent to Ballaster that Lady Ruth was under a misapprehension – surely rather a comical misapprehension. She believed herself to be in his latest book. She believed that, as a result of swift and penetrating observation of her character made upon the occasion of their former meeting, he had been able to draw a faithful image of her in some corner of The Glory from the Grey. Nothing was more certain than that this was sheer hallucination. It would have to be a weird theory of the unconscious indeed that could lend the notion the slightest plausibility. He had certainly never plumbed Lady Ruth’s character, as she expressed it, “to the depths”. There were no depths to plumb. His very meeting with her brother and herself was still entirely vague in his mind. And he just didn’t believe that by even the most devious of neural paths any shadow of her had crept into his novel.
But it was eminently an occasion for tact. Common humanity required that he shouldn’t laugh at the woman, even that he shouldn’t abruptly disillusion her. Moreover, he found something quaintly endearing in her absurd supposition. He really liked her very much. Quite apart from her ingenuously revealed degree of social desirability – he was able to assure himself – he really liked her. Perhaps he had better accept her fancy: the harmless fancy that Lady Ruth Dumbill had her niche in The Glory from the Grey.
“But, my dear Lady Ruth, this is terrible!” He decided to begin on a note of mock alarm. “It is never my intention to give anything like the effect of a roman à clef. If you, or anybody else, starts from the page, then assuredly my art is a failure.” He paused. “Characters,” he said impressively, “should come from the deep well. The deep well of unconscious cerebration.”
“You mean just out of the writer’s head?” Lady Ruth was looking disappointed and puzzled.
“One draws upon actual life. One draws, no doubt, upon myriads of real individuals.” This was a piece out of a lecture Ballaster sometimes gave in provincial cities, and it was rendered in rather high relief. “Myriads of real individuals,” he reiterated. “But they sink down into the deep well – and they have undergone a sea-change before they emerge again.” He frowned, noticing for the first time that he had here put his images together rather awkwardly. “The elements have split up and recombined. Katabolism and anabolism. The most subtle of psychic chemistries. It is no doubt mortal men – and women, my dear lady – who go down. But it is nurslings of immortality that come up again. Oh, brave new world that has such people in’t!”
Lady Ruth, if she had not precisely followed this sketch for an aesthetic theory, had made enough of it to show some disposition to cry. “You can’t mean—” she began, and looked at Ballaster quite piteously.
Ballaster thought of the luncheon parties. And, apart from that, the poor woman was genuinely appealing. It would be a shame to spoil her fun. “Of course,” he went on, “there are exceptions. One meets a striking personality—”
She was looking up, round-eyed. “Yes?” she breathed.
“And the process I have been describing is – well, short-circuited. Put simply, little sketches from the life do slip in.” He stopped, wondering how far to take this gratuitous benevolence. He mustn’t risk being made a fool of. What would she tell her friends? And at this speculation, a new thought came into Ballaster’s head. He did in a casual way meet a great many wealthy and fashionable people. They even a little attended to him, although not nearly so much as would be pleasant. Would there be any harm in letting the idea get about that some small contemporary portraits lurked in the
Ballaster books? After all, there was room for them. He had always crowded the canvas. “Mr Ballaster’s enormous vitality” – he liked the reviewers to say—”enables him, indeed compels him, to animate every inch.” If Lady Ruth Dumbill were to be admitted as peering from amid these proliferations would it be fair that she should be absolutely uncompanioned? Ballaster gave a whimsical but yet weighty nod. “Yes,” he repeated, “they do slip in.”
“Striking personalities?”
It was a second before Ballaster recalled that he had used this expression – so he had to give his assent, when it came, rather hastily. His mind wasn’t, conceivably, without some shade of compunction over all this prevarication, even although it was prevarication of so magnanimous an order. Faint unease made him the more ready to do the thing handsomely. “And if one really falls in love with someone,” he said, “an artist’s love, that is to say – one just can’t bear to alter her. Him or her, that is.”
Lady Ruth gave what could only be a happy sigh. “And yet,” she murmured, “they say that love is blind! It can’t be true of the sort you mean: the artist’s sort. Because it was the utter truth of it all, you know, that I was aware of as I read. You told me far, far more about myself than I had ever known. And intuitively, as we agreed. It seems to me very, very wonderful.”
Ballaster’s last uneasiness faded. It occurred to him that, in a sense, all this might be perfectly valid. Wasn’t The Glory from the Grey what one Sunday-paper critic had called it: a field, like Langland’s in Piers Plowman, full of folk? Wasn’t it perfectly reasonable that all sorts of people should enjoy the sensation of meeting their own image in it? But just where – it now occurred to him to speculate – had this amiable if so strikingly limited creature done so?
Rather as one flicks over a card-index, Ballaster passed a selection of the characters of The Glory from the Grey rapidly under review. There were two or three possibilities – which just showed, he might in decent secrecy reflect, how rich the thing was; how far he had got in what he was fond of calling his grand task of restoring its traditional amplitude to the English Novel. For instance, there was Mary Vane, who had been so dumbly devoted to Honoria at school, and whom Honoria had later befriended when she found her so disagreeably employed as a governess. Might it be Mary Vane? A moment’s reflection told Ballaster that this wasn’t very probable. Mary indeed had something of the comfortableness of his visitor, and something too, of her amiable openness and simplicity. But it was unlikely that Lady Ruth, although she seemed to set no special store on social distinctions, would spontaneously imagine herself as portrayed in a governess.
Ballaster laughed inwardly. There was rather a good guessing game in this, and his knowledge of human nature had at once prevented his making one bad guess. But what about Jane Munden? She rather faded out in the second half – the truth was that he had plain forgotten about her in the furore of writing the final chapters – but when you thought about it you saw that she was one of the nicest people in the book. She had been utterly loyal to Honoria in all those troubles with the musical genius Slaymaker. Or was it Mrs Slaymaker – Priscilla, he seemed to remember he’d called her – Priscilla who had been so quietly philosophical when her husband stopped noticing her, but who revealed the nature of her frustrations later on by her fanatical opposition to stag hunting? Priscilla Slaymaker was a good sort; she had given Honoria that letter unopened, after keeping it back so that Honoria could enjoy her tremendous triumph on the night of the Saddle Club dance. Had he ever, he wondered, done a better sequence than those Windsor scenes? But that was by the way. The point was that he had spotted his really delightful little visitor’s odd piece of self-identification. Of course it remained ridiculous, but it confirmed him in the opinion – otherwise arrived at – that Lady Ruth had rather good taste. And he must make that point now. “You liked my Priscilla Slaymaker?” he asked. “I’m delighted. She’s one of my own very favourite characters in all the books.”
For a moment Lady Ruth frowned, as if in the effort of recollection. Then her face cleared. “Oh, yes – indeed,” she said. “And, you know, I have had friends like that. Not that it’s very much in the various relationships and circumstances that you’ve made it all fit. Anything like that, of course, mightn’t have been very nice. No – it’s in the core of character. I hadn’t read twenty pages before I knew that, in Honoria Manifold, you were searching me to the very depths of my being. Revealing so much to me! Thank you,
thank you, once again.”
At first Ballaster simply hadn’t got there. He was conscious that Priscilla Slaymaker was another bad guess; that his knowledge of human nature hadn’t quite taken him to the target, after all. But it was seconds before he heard, as if repeated to an inner ear, the unmistakable words that Lady Ruth had spoken. She saw herself in Honoria. She saw herself in his Honoria. Even more, she saw herself as having inspired Honoria!
It was an enormity the dimensions of which had positively to be groped for. And Ballaster groped. He went on groping while Lady Ruth went on talking. Honoria Manifold! Hadn’t she been described on the air by his old friend Ambrose Jillet – to whom, poor devil, he had given a decent dinner only yesterday – as at once the rarest and the most complex of the Ballaster creations? Hadn’t somebody else declared – in a magazine said to be usefully influential with the younger generation – that Honoria was like a great landscape painting evincing a lavish fusion of genres? “It is as if we could treasure on one canvas”—hadn’t the fellow written?—
“Whate’er Lorraine light-touched with softening hue,
Or savage Rosa dash! d, or learned Poussin drew.”
And here was this mouse of a woman – a brilliant if inconsequent image flashed into Ballaster’s kindled and indignant mind – thinking she had been doing the roaring! It was outrageous. But also, of course, it was painful and embarrassing. Means must at once be taken to bring the grotesque interview to a close.
But meanwhile Lady Ruth, mistaking stupefaction for close attention, was expanding her theme. What had given her a first glimpse of the amazing power with which Charles Ballaster had instantaneously read her character was the early chapter in which the child Honoria – quaintly, absurdly, yet with a profound prophetic truth – had seen before herself a long exhausting struggle to cope with men, to be faithful to the lonely pride of her own spirit in the face of all that was cripplingly possessive in the love of those who would successively throw themselves at her feet. Lady Ruth had at once remembered how powerfully this true intuition of the future had once possessed her. But of course that wasn’t all. The big things weren’t all. There were tiny touches too – some of them on merely the physical level. How could he have observed so exquisitely – at only one meeting! –how she moved, phrased things, even put on a glove?
Ballaster listened dimly, but heard enough to convince himself that the woman was mad. He took a cautious look at her. Her comfortable face was comfortable no longer. It was curiously alive – more alive, somehow, than he liked a face to be. For a moment the spectacle obscurely generalised itself, and he knew that in every human being there is life lurking beneath life. But the thought was a fugitive one before the rising tide of his indignation.
He went on seeming to listen, and he even made a few tactful, a few virtually condoning and acquiescent remarks. He had no instinct to speak up and speak out – it wasn’t the artist’s job – and he told himself that, anyway, it would be uncharitable to disillusion the creature. But somehow he did manage to bring his little tea-party to a close. He had rung a bell for Mrs Kember; he was standing encouragingly near his drawing-room door; he was patting – yes, he was actually patting – the crazy Lady Ruth Dumbill’s fingers. A kindly nature, it was gratifying to reflect, is true to itself even in the most testing situations.
“A marvellous power!” She had returned, finally, to the heart of her feeling in the matter. “And so—so nobly wielded. When it could, of course, be abused. Like all great powers. And made to hurt.”
“To hurt?” His attention was caught for a moment. But he looked at her with benevolent whimsicality. He gave a final little pat.
And Mrs Kember was in the room. “Good-bye,” he was able to say. “Good-bye, dear Lady Ruth. It was so very, very nice of you to come.”
Her face was wholly comfortable again; it was as if she had closed the door on the shallow little inner chamber of her mind – a chamber (Ballaster cleverly thought) furnished, like one in a fun-fair, merely with a few crudely distorting mirrors.
“Oh, but thank you!” Her face was faintly flushed with pleasure. “And now how much”—she murmured as she prepared to follow Mrs Kember from the room—”I shall look forward to everything you write!”
Left alone, Ballaster took a composing turn up and down. He even paused to study one of his mother’s charming water-colours – it was the Bay of Naples – on the wall. He told himself he was extremely diverted; that if ever he met Lady Ruth again his small secret knowledge of her would quicken into amusement once more – as happens when one bows respectfully in front of a woman whose naked body one remembers, since she has fleetingly been one’s mistress long ago.
Tentatively, and cautiously, in case Mrs Kember heard, Ballaster laughed aloud. It was – to him it was – very amusing indeed. With some writers it would be otherwise. Hadn’t he said something to Lady Ruth about the vanity of authors? Well, there were some authors who would be deeply mortified by an incident so grotesque.
Ballaster laughed again, more robustly. Maturity, wisdom – say merely a sense of humour – saved one from a lot. It had been extremely funny. And of course his own withers were unwrung: this was evident in the entire charitableness of his feeling towards his late visitor. It hadn’t merely been funny; it had been rich.
Ballaster found that he had paused before his desk. On the writing-pad there still lay that empty page which betokened his morning’s futile searching for a theme. And suddenly he realised that he was in possession if not indeed of riches, at least of a small unexpected accession of capital. To spend it might be to deprive himself of some luncheon parties – but then mightn’t spending it be fun? He had reflected that he wasn’t a satirist, and certainly he had never taken a shot at the sheerly ludicrous. Yet one ought surely to explore new manners from time to time. And with just a little manipulation, with – to put it crudely – just a little guying …
Charles Ballaster sat down and wrote rapidly. At first his expression was severe, and there was a frown of concentration on his high intellectual forehead. But gradually his features relaxed into a smile. It might have been the smile of a man whose memories of the naked body of a mistress are being communicated to a circle of congenial friends.
He was still writing when Mrs Kember rang her little silver bell.
DOUBLE BUZZ
Boisterous dons, feline dons, remote dons: it was a big night and common room seemed full of them. Like any body of men brought together on highly selective principles, they looked rather queerer than a merely random bunch would have done. No doubt you got used to them. But a first exposure was disturbing. Clazy wished he had chosen a smaller night for his debut as their new boy. He even wished that he had chosen a smaller college to become a junior fellow of. But naturally it had been entirely a matter of the place choosing him. He had sat, solemnly gowned, together with three other short-listed persons, in a room adjoining this one. And then they had been interviewed, one after another like schoolboys seeking a scholarship, by five or six solemnly gowned men representing the collective wisdom of the college.
Clazy noticed several members of the interviewing committee milling around now – getting ready, as undergraduates put it, to punish the port. When one or another of these men caught sight of Clazy he didn’t – it puzzled Clazy to notice – show any overt sign of horrified recognition and recollection. He didn’t know who Clazy was. Nobody knew who Clazy was. Clazy found this alarming. Or perhaps undermining would be the better word.
He had, after all, dined and gone through this common-room stuff before. All the short-listed persons had done that: it was part of the ritual of selection and election. And on that previous evening quite a lot of the men now present had introduced themselves and conversed with him. They had conversed with him in the friendliest manner and with the most absorbed interest. And if they had at the same time given him the quick once-over, that was no more than part of the business on hand. Did he bite his nails? Was he the sort of man who m
ight wear a tartan tie? It had all been fair enough. But tonight none of these people paid the slightest attention to him. Perhaps he wasn’t real. Since he was a philosopher, Clazy had to address himself to this issue from time to time in a professional way. At the moment, he realised, it was presenting itself to him accompanied by a feeling-tone different from the ordinary.
But he had concluded too hastily. Somebody was attending to him. In fact, he was being shouted at from the other end of the room by a large shaggy man of advanced years. The antiquity of the shaggy man somehow made his shouting seem even more aberrant than it would otherwise have been, so that Clazy was rendered uncomfortable. Now the shaggy man was bearing down on him with a fierce smile and an extended hand. Clazy, who had understood that dons did even less hand-shaking than undergraduates, committed himself to an awkward bow before putting out his hand in turn. Then it appeared that the shaggy man wasn’t proposing to shake hands with Clazy after all; he had in fact seized him in a paralysing way above the elbow – it was the first movement, perhaps, in some bit of rudimentary unarmed combat taught during the Boer War – and tipped him into a chair next to his own. It seemed a piece of purely official cordiality. The shaggy man held some office or other which required him to preside over these convivialities.
Round the long table, however, people were fending for themselves. He had been told about this. In the common rooms of smaller colleges, they had explained, there was a great deal of dragooning chaps around and firmly telling A to place himself beside B. But not here. And certainly tonight, when there must be more than thirty people preparing to sit down, they just scrummed.
The Man Who Wrote Detective Stories Page 10